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What is it?
An Agile Certified Practitioner focuses on Value Driven Delivery – delivering value to the customer as soon as possible. There are four parts:
- Define positive value
- Avoid potential downsides
- Prioritisation
- Incremental development
Define Positive Value
This means project requirements (features) are prioritized based on value. This prioritised list forms the backlog of work. Then the development team works to deliver the most-valuable items first.
Define Positive Value: Step-by-Step
- Define a customer-valued list of deliverables or features that can be produced incrementally in order.
- Refine the requirements for these features by gathering their acceptance criteria – the “definition of done”.
- Work to improve the team’s process over time through retrospectives, in order to optimize value delivery.
Avoid Potential Downsides
This means delivering in increments of value, so the customer can provide feedback, changes in priority, and address risks in the project incrementally too.
Avoid Potential Downsides: Step-by-Step
- Organise requirements into “Minimum Viable Products” (MVPs) – small, releasable increments – in order to deliver value early.
- Solicit customer and user feedback by reviewing these increments often.
- Limit increment size and review with the customer frequently to confirm business value, and identify and respond to risks early and at minimal cost.
Prioritisation
This means we prioritise the backlog of requirements from most value to least value (in the customer’s eyes), and we periodically update and reprioritise with the customer or product owner so the team is always working on the most valuable items.
Prioritization: Step-by-Step
- Prioritize the increments or features by collaborating with the customer (or customer-based stakeholders such as the Product Owner).
- Perform frequent reviews of the backlog list to ensure it has the most value delivered first.
- Continuously the team process to ensure quality deliverables.
Incremental Development
This is where the work gets done. By delivering in increments the team addresses the most valuable requirements first, addresses risk in smaller doses, ensures features are reviewed and deliver what the customer wanted, and future features are still in the right order.
Incremental development: Step by Step
- Create periodic checkpoints with stakeholders to gain feedback to current and future work, by performing inspections, reviews, and/or testing .
- Incorporate both value-producing and risk-reducing features into the backlog.
- Elicit relevant non-functional requirements (such as operations and security) as well.
- Re-prioritize requirements periodically in order to reflect changes in stakeholder needs or preferences
These four domains are the key for the Agile Certified Practitioner. Understand that the goal of Agile is to identify value, rank the value based on the customer’s needs, protect the value, and deliver value through increments.